


the taste of ashes

by BlackSclera



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Blood and Injury, Estraneo get their hands on Tsuna, Human Experimentation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:41:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24039817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackSclera/pseuds/BlackSclera
Summary: Sawada Tsunayoshi goes missing when he is seven years old.“Without a doubt, it is a great deal unsophisticated than that of Vongola’s bullet,”they tell him once through his screaming, manic delight in their smiles and fingers curled over a vial of kerosene,“but who would have thought that simply burning to death would bring about the same results?”
Comments: 26
Kudos: 78





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i wanted to write something simple and short and maybe fluffy.  
> this was the result. what the hell.

The boy has dark blue eyes, so he calls him Blue.

He has never heard him speak, but Tsunayoshi has heard him scream behind reinforced steel so many times that it sometimes chases him even in his sleep. He usually sits in the corner of his side of the room, knees hugged to his chest and eyes downcast. There are holes the size of the thickest needles in the bend of his arm and blood often finds its way on the side of his head and through his hair.

There is another boy. _Yellow,_ he thinks, one who is more animal than he is human and one who seems fond of Blue. He is loud, unlike the other boy; quick to anger, a spitfire temper that the people in white openly disliked. With him, they are a little less kind. They grip his wrist until his bones creak, patches of his hair ripped without much concern for his discomfort after his turn in the white room, and like everything else about him, he is also loud in his pain.

At first, Tsunayoshi wonders why Yellow has not learned to grit his teeth like the rest of them. They have been in this place longer than he has been. Dressed in ragged white with bandages around their too thin limbs and eyes desolate of any life, everyone knows that the adults hate loud children. Blue knows this too– knows this _best_ because he hears him trying, muffling his screams the best he could around an inhumanely pale arm or leather. The people in white praise him for it – _good boy, you are such a well-behaved child, if everyone else could be a little like you then it wouldn’t hurt them as much_ – and Tsunayoshi can tell the boy loathes it.

 _“He can’t,”_ another child with disfigured skin tells him in a hushed voice when he stares a little too long at the crying blond boy. _“He just can’t,”_ she repeats when Tsunayoshi says he doesn’t understand.

He isn’t the smartest, he never has been. In fact, he doesn’t figure it out until Yellow comes limping through the door with a bleeding mouth, teeth puncturing holes through his lips.

More animal than human, he remembers. It must hurt to even keep them closed.

Tsunayoshi doesn’t know their names, but he won’t ask for them. He is content to refer to them by their colors in the privacy of his thoughts.

In a place where they are robbed of their very humanity, they keep what they can have. The blue-eyed boy has his glasses. The blond boy has his temper.

And Tsunayoshi who has nothing but the faded memory of his mother’s face will not take that from them.


	2. Chapter 2

“They are fond of you,” a boy tells him one day.

Tsunayoshi knows him. Everyone does. He is one of the few who isn’t afraid to give away his name, perpetually wearing a smile that is thin at the edges and laced with a poisonous hatred that all the children living in the white walled basement harbored under their bruised skin.

He inclines his head, not quite in agreement of the thought but of the sentiment. Studies the anxious edge to the boy’s smile.

“I do not envy you,” the boy continues, surprisingly. He isn’t as quiet as Blue or as explosive as Yellow but he has always been careful with his words. How he holds and presents himself in front of others, how he speaks and what tone he uses to speak. In this place, that precision and control over what was left of them could mean their survival. It is unexpected that he would sit beside Tsunayoshi and talk to him at all.

Tsunayoshi mirrors his smile. The black lines on the length of his arm throb painfully in remembrance.

“No one does,” he replies.

Because in the end, it all boils down to the fact that there aren’t many who survive and there are even fewer who want to. The children he sees do not stay the same for long, always changing, always _different_ but with the same haunted eyes. Their only salvation is the very moment their body becomes too broken for experimentation; only then are they put down like rabid dogs and discarded like scraps of metal rather than the children they all were.

Tsunayoshi isn’t like them. He knows this because the adults are careful with him. Because they want him to _survive_. They do not like leaving scars or injecting substances or changing his body into something unrecognizable like the others. Out of every single child they kept, he looked the most human and well-fed. ‘Precious goods’, they called him, a valuable and indispensable asset that they couldn’t afford to irreparably damage for something that only he had, something which had to do with the number of times they have strapped him to a chair, doused him in kerosene, and burned him alive.

( _"Without a doubt, it is a great deal unsophisticated than that of Vongola’s bullet,”_ they tell him once through his screaming, manic delight in their smiles and fingers curled over a vial of kerosene, _“but who would have thought that simply burning to death would bring about the same results?”_ )

“Do you know why?” the other boy asks, a polite formality in his voice that belied the knowing quirk of his smile.

It is a lot to ask in a few number of words. It could mean so many things and nothing at all that Tsunayoshi is momentarily silenced.

And then he hears a whisper.

Frosty, layered with several voices, and painfully familiar.

It had been there when Tsunayoshi had fallen down the stairs and bled at the foot of it with the sound of his mother’s desperate scream echoing in his head. It had been there when he crossed a road to chase after a ball that had been too big for his fingers to grip and someone riding a bicycle had crashed into him. It had been _there_ when the men in black ripped him away from his mother’s hands and shot her in her throat.

Tsunayoshi had never listened before, too afraid of what the alien in his head was and what it meant.

But that was _before_. In this place, he had nothing to lose, no semblance of normality or humanity to protect. His mother would not scold him for talking to the voices in his head because she’s gone. No one is here to point fingers because they’re all _monsters_.

Like Blue, like Yellow, like that girl with the disfigured skin who disappeared in a black garbage bag and never came back.

Tsunayoshi’s eyes burn. Not in the way his flesh does when they pour kerosene on him or the way his eyes sting from tears, but akin to the warmth of his mother’s last embrace.

He lifts a hand and brushes the hair from the other boy's eyes. 

“For the very same they keep you alive,” he says as he stares into bright red and the _six_ that is engraved deep into its middle.

The boy - _Mukuro_ \- laughs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (He is fortunate, Tsunayoshi thinks, that he has only died six times. A bullet is clean, almost painless if they aimed right.
> 
> Burning doesn’t give you the luxury of a quick death.)


	3. Chapter 3

Tsunayoshi’s first death happens in his sleep. So does his second.

It’s his third death that snaps him awake, strapped to a chair by his wrists and neck and _screaming_ from the heat until he went numb. He doesn’t remember much from it aside from the smell of smoke and the body of a child lying next to him.

He wouldn’t know this, at least not then, but it would happen a few more times. It isn’t until later that the adults thought to make sure he stayed conscious long enough to realize what is happening when his injuries started to heal at an ordinary pace.

“Why are you doing this?” Tsunayoshi remembers crying. He still had hope of escaping then, silent prayers of someone coming to take him away from this place and keep him safe filling the static noise in his mind.

“We are Estraneo,” one of them says, glasses glinting bright under the fluorescent light. It is said with a hopeful sort of pride that made Tsunayoshi’s stomach churn, as if the name should mean something to him other than the identity of his captors, as if that is explanation enough for everything that they have done and plan on doing. “Don’t be scared. We won’t break you like the others. You are _special_ , after all.”

He strikes the matchstick with a smile. Behind him, another drags a gagged girl his age by her arms next to where the bespectacled man stood.

“It truly is a miracle that we got to you before your stupid father did.”

And Tsunayoshi, he doesn’t remember his father beyond distant memories of contempt. He doesn’t know how these people know him, doesn’t know why they speak of him like the mere thought of him leaves a bad taste in their mouths, but he is a child at the mercy of his captors and all he can do is wonder if maybe this is his father’s fault.

_Maybe if he came home. Maybe if he was there for us._

The matchstick drops to the trail of kerosene that pooled beneath his chair.

_Maybe this wouldn’t have happened._

Fire engulfs him. From the balls of his feet to the tips of his fingers, melting away at his flesh and mending the cloth of his shirt into skin.

This time, Tsunayoshi is awake. He feels every second of it, feels the way his screams scrape at his throat, feels the way his senses go _numb_ from the intensity of the heat and the way his body reflexively fights to escape its metal bindings.

He feels the precise moment it _stops_ , his consciousness seeming to realign itself and his vision snapping from red-orange- _fire_ to the sight of his body burning on the chair from the eyes of the young girl standing next to the man.

And then it is the girl who is screaming in _his_ body, the girl who is _dying_ from the fire while Tsunayoshi watches, whole, safe, and alive.

“Do you understand it now?” the man asks as he turns to look at him who is residing in the body of the young girl, gleeful smile still intact.

Tsunayoshi does, but he desperately wishes he doesn’t.

*

It can only happen when he dies.

The subject of his possession is brought into his body when he does and they are instantly killed by the severity of his injuries. He doesn’t understand it, not to the extent that the rest of Estraneo does, but he uses _something_ of the bodies he possesses to heal and repair the damage that has been done on his real body. By the time it ends, it is as if nothing has happened to him at all.

The only difference is the markings on his arm.

A branding, a reminder, a _tally counter._

Twelve, it counts. Then, fifteen.

Tsunayoshi can do nothing as they bring one child after the other into the room with him. They do not make it out alive. They never do.

(He stops counting when it reaches thirty.)

**Author's Note:**

> hello i make fanarts of khr in: https://twitter.com/zurre_?s=09 👉👈 if ever you guys want to interact, id be happy to talk with some of you :((


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